Tagcontemporary_art

My first ever published illustrations for a story book by Milan Kališ, an young Slovak author, handle with both fascination and critique of urban life, just like the knotty, heavy jungle-like texts of the edition are. Milan gave me free hand to come with some drawings for the collection of short (and long) analysis of contemporary city life. This was rather challenging, as his writings are as complex and as detailed as could be and there was, to my eyes, no need to ‘illustrate’ these story or transfer part of them into drawing. But the idea came to me not to ‘base’ my illustration on text, but to create an independent art work to ‘add’ value to the artistic aspect of literature, better than to just describe with images what Milan brilliantly says. The trash tattoo-like or graph-like urban drawings in black and white appeared a clear option then to me, and as despair and efforts to get rid of it seemed to be the central point of his story-telling genius, I immediately thought the theme of a ‘sin’ would give the effect I looked for – not actually depicting the story on ‘other media’ level, but this could create a new story within the book based on the same kind of ‘research’ as Milan’s stories are. The choice has been made. Under the influence of my recent trips to the very medieval Avignon and Florence, I decided not to ‘picture’ the sin as an act, but I’ve turned to the medieval iconography of ‘sin-in-itself-pictured’. Giotto, Bosch, Dûrer etc. constituted for me the starting point of my research. The old playing-cards forms were another source of inspiration. The ‘seven deadly sins’ series was born and Milan accepted to integrate this to his book ‘ Rozdrásané duše ‘ ( – this would be translated as something as: Disjont souls).

The book can be purchased it any bookshop in Slovakia, or on-line here: http://www.martinus.sk/?uItem=218945

Signed and numbered giclée prints on fine art paper of these illustrations 30×20 cm can be purchased by contacting me by e-mail for 350 € (7 prints in total + international shipping included).